Re: Predictable and consistent net interface naming in guests

On Mon, 31 Oct 2022 14:48:54 +0000 Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 04:32:27PM +0200, Edward Haas wrote: >> Hi Igor and Laine, >> >> I would like to revive a 2 years old discussion [1] about consistent network >> interfaces in the guest. >> >> That discussion mentioned that a guest PCI address may change in two cases: >> - The PCI topology changes. >> - The machine type changes. >> >> Usually, the machine type is not expected to change, especially if one >> wants to allow migrations between nodes. >> I would hope to argue this should not be problematic in practice, because >> guest images would be made per a specific machine type. >> >> Regarding the PCI topology, I am not sure I understand what changes >> need to occur to the domxml for a defined guest PCI address to change. >> The only think that I can think of is a scenario where hotplug/unplug is >> used, >> but even then I would expect existing devices to preserve their PCI address >> and the plug/unplug device to have a reserved address managed by the one >> acting on it (the management system). >> >> Could you please help clarify in which scenarios the PCI topology can cause >> a mess to the naming of interfaces in the guest? >> >> Are there any plans to add the acpi_index support? > > This was implemented a year & a half ago > > https://libvirt.org/formatdomain.html#network-interfaces > > though due to QEMU limitations this only works for the old > i440fx chipset, not Q35 yet. Q35 should work partially too. In its case acpi-index support is limited to hotplug enabled root-ports and PCIe-PCI bridges. One also has to enable ACPI PCI hotplug (it's enled by default on recent machine types) for it to work (i.e.it's not supported in native PCIe hotplug mode). So if mgmt can put nics on root-ports/bridges, then acpi-index should just work on Q35 as well.